Tower of Glass

8

October 18, 2218.

The tower has reached the 280-meter level, and grows perceptibly higher every hour. By day it glistens brilliantly even in the pale Arctic sunlight, and looks like a shining spear that someone has thrust into the tundra. By night it is even more dazzling, for it reflects the myriad lights of the kilometer-high reflector plates by which the night crews work.

Its real beauty is still to come. What exists thus far is merely the base, necessarily broad and thick-walled. Justin Maledetto’s plan calls for an elegantly tapering tower, a slender obelisk of glass to prick the stratosphere, and the line of taper is just now becoming apparent; from this point on the structure will contract toward a stunning delicacy of form.

Although it has attained less than a fifth of its intended height, Krug’s tower is already the tallest structure in the Northwest Territories, and is exceeded north of the sixtieth parallel only by the Chase/Krug Building in Fairbanks, 320 meters high, and the old 300 meter Kotzebue Needle overlooking Bering Strait. The Needle will be surpassed in a day or two, the Chase/Krug a few days after that. By late November, topping 500 meters, the tower will be the tallest building in the solar system. And even then it will be scarcely more than a third of the way toward its full stature.

The android laborers work smoothly and rhythmically. Except for the unhappy incident in September, there have been no fatal accidents. The technique of fastening the great glass blocks to the grapples of the scooprods and guiding them to the top of the tower has become second nature to everyone. On all eight sides at once blocks rise, are jockeyed into place, are fused to the previous course of the tower, while the next series of blocks already is being maneuvered into the scooprods.

The tower is no longer a hollow shell. Work had begun on the interior construction — the housings for the intricate tachyon-beam communications gear with which messages will be sent, at speeds far exceeding that of light, to the planetary nebula NGC 7293. Justin Maledetto’s design calls for horizontal partitions every twenty meters, except in five regions of the tower where the size of the communications equipment modules will require the floors to be placed at sixty-meter intervals. The five lowest partitions have been partly built, and the joists are in place for the sixth, seventh, and eighth. The floors of the tower are fashioned from the same clear glass that is being used for the outer wall. Nothing must mar the transparency of the building. Maledetto has esthetic reasons for insisting on that; the tachyon-beam people have scientific reasons for sharing the architect’s concern with allowing the free passage of light.

Viewing the unfinished tower, then, from a distance of, say, one kilometer, one is struck by a sense of its fragility and vulnerability. One sees the beams of sparkling morning sunlight dancing and leaping through the walls as though through the waters of a shallow, crystalline lake; one is able to make out the tiny dark figures of androids moving about like ants on the interior partitions, which themselves are nearly invisible; one feels that a sudden sharp gust off Hudson Bay could shiver the tower to splinters in a moment. Only when one comes nearer, when one observes that those invisible floors are thicker than a man is tall, when one becomes aware of how massive the outer skin of the tower actually is, when one is able to feel the unimaginable weight of the colossus pressing on the frozen ground, does one cease to think of dancing sunbeams and realize that Simeon Krug is erecting the mightiest structure in the history of mankind.